Bob Calverley and Miss Ffrench, the only important representatives of the ordinary virtues in Long Odds, are little more than dim shadows contrasted with the clearly-marked personalities of half a dozen others [p 85] in the story who are rogues, or the associates and instruments of rogues. ‘The human anguish of every page’ of His Natural Life which Lord Rosebery found so compelling to his attention, need not have been so continuous and unqualified.
The author seems purposely to have ignored the opportunity afforded by the story for the introduction of a character who, while asserting the claims of Rufus Dawes and the broader interests of humanity, need not have defeated the main motive of the plot. It was a decided error not to gratify in this way the combative instinct of the reader. The Rev. James North—‘gentleman, scholar, and Christian priest’—might have been an active opponent of cruelty like Eden, the clergyman in It’s Never Too Late to Mend, instead of being made a pitiable example of a confirmed and self-accusing drunkard.
The strength of His Natural Life lies not so much in the ingenuity and dramatic quality of its plot, as in the number of striking personalities among its leading characters. That of Rufus Dawes, curiously, is distinct [p 86] only at intervals. It represents, for the most part, a hopeless sufferer passing through a series of punishments which become almost monotonous in their unvaried severity.
But what could be more luminous than the portrait of Sarah Purfoy, the clever, self-possessed adventuress with the single redeeming quality of an invincible love for her worthless and villainous convict-husband? or that of Frere, the swaggering, red-whiskered, coarsely good-humoured convict-driver, glorying in his knowledge of the heights and depths of criminal ingenuity and vice, and frankly ignorant of all else?
How naturally from such a person comes that savagely humorous dissertation upon the treatment of prisoners! ‘There is a sort of satisfaction to me, by George! in keeping the scoundrels in order. I like to see the fellows’ eyes glint at you as you walk past ’em. Gad! they’d tear me to pieces if they dared, some of ’em.’
Frere is a triumph of consistent literary portraiture. He is generally understood to have been a study from life. But as the [p 87] official whose name has sometimes been associated with the character was a considerably more humane disciplinarian than the persecutor of Rufus Dawes, it must be assumed that Clarke aimed only at the representation of a type.
Brutes like Frere and his vindictive associates, Burgess and Troke, there undoubtedly were on the settlements, but the average official has probably a better representative in Major Vickers, the Commandant. Vickers is not an unkind man, but does not trust himself to do anything unprovided for in the ‘regulations,’ for which he has an abject respect. ‘It is not for me to find fault with the system,’ he says; ‘but I have sometimes wondered if kindness would not succeed better than the chain-gang and the cat.’ But he never gives intelligence, much less kindness, a fair trial.
Sylvia Vickers is the only complete picture of a good woman to be found in any of the author’s stories. Taken in childhood by her parents to the penal settlements, and separated there for years from youthful society, [p 88] familiarised with the constant aspects of crime and suffering, and habitually in the society of her elders, she early develops into a quaint, matter-of-fact little creature, such as might well disconcert a peacock like the Reverend Meekin.
To Frere, whose knowledge of other women has been mainly immoral, her innocence and wilfulness, and her instinctive dislike of him, serve as a strong attraction. Though he becomes her husband by means of a cruel fraud, he never fully gains her trust, and the estrangement so tragically sealed in the last chapter of the novel comes almost as a relief to the sympathetic reader of her sad history. Sylvia Vickers, despite the gloomy environment of her youth, is throughout an intensely womanly woman, the delicate conception of whose character surely places her creator far above the rank of the cynics in literature.
Not the least of the elements which combine to make His Natural Life one of the most remarkable novels of the century is the occasional skilful varying of its painful realism [p 89] with a colouring of romance, as in the relations between Dawes and Sylvia: his absorbing devotion when she is so strangely made dependent upon him at the deserted settlement; his long-continued confidence that she will effect his vindication and deliverance; and, finally, the dominant motive of securing her safety against North with which he escapes from the gaol at Norfolk Island, and joins her in the doomed schooner on its last voyage to Van Diemen’s Land.